Critic Reviews

Metascore

This thrilling stop-motion animated adventure is a high point in Selick's career of creating handcrafted wonderlands of beauty blended with deep, disconcerting creepiness.

100

Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman

Selick's fantastical adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel will be too dazzlingly rich for many; it'll be like "caviare to the general," as Hamlet said of a complex play enacted for a public with lazy minds.

This is a marvelous family story, tapping into all sorts of childhood dreams and nightmares involving Mommy, monsters and heroic youngsters. Selick's imaginative sets and puppets are in perfect pitch with Gaiman's fantasy.

It pulls audiences into a meticulously detailed universe, familiar in many respects, wacked and menacing in many others.

80

VarietyJustin Chang

This eccentric and deliriously inventive fantasy finds stop-motion auteur Henry Selick scaling new heights of ghoulish whimsy, buoyed by a haunting score that works its own macabre magic.

80

Village Voice

Coraline Jones isn't the pluckiest or most ingratiating sprite ever to take center stage in a children's film, and her (mis)adventures aren't especially novel, but Coraline is still a consistent splendor to behold.